Aretha Franklin: How gospel, burgers and a preacher helped develop her signature sound

Franklin said her voice was sent from God, but a look at her life story and back catalogue reveals her long – and not always smooth – road to the sound she is known for now

The American Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues Performance, Female, became known as the Aretha Award, such was her dominance (Getty)

In 1985, seeking to honour Aretha Franklin (hailed since the Sixties as the Queen of Soul, and known variously as Sister Ree, Lady Soul and La Diva Franklin), the state of Michigan declared her a “Natural Resource”. This must have flattered the singer, although she may have been mildly irked that it made her sound as if she grew on trees. What comes across as natural doesn’t always come naturally.

On the face of it, Franklin’s two favourite hobbies – smoking (two packets of Kool Lights a day) and eating (anything with meat in it, but particularly cheeseburgers) – do not follow a recommended regimen for singers. But you could say that both have paid off in her performance, the cigarettes guaranteeing that rasping edge she gets up high and lending the voice colour at the points where it distorts into a scream, the burgers maintaining a frame ample enough to sustain it all.

Franklin, whose father was a preacher, has occasionally remarked that her voice is sent from God, although it is clear she has had at least to take it out of the packaging and almost certainly put the parts together herself. Researching Nowhere to Run, her commanding book on the history of soul music, the writer Gerri Hirshey gained access to Franklin’s notebooks from the period in 1970, when she was recording the album Spirit in the Dark: “Just a touch more of the girls and Arif [Marlin]’s strings and a groove would be to start them on a low F to a high F like Alt Alt ...” It is no coincidence that the singer described as “natural”, “inspired”, and “raw” is the same person who keeps detailed handwritten observations about her sessions in a series of yellow legal pads.

In 1968, Franklin told a journalist from the American magazine Downbeat that she would always sing properly, from the stomach, when she was able to sit at the piano and think about what she was doing; but the necessities of self-presentation increasingly forced her to stand before her audiences, at which point she would lose her self-possession to some extent and start singing from the throat. Thus her style arrived – not in a flash of light, necessarily, but in a collision between the unschooled tendencies of her voice and the demands of showbusiness.

You can hear that during the ad libs towards the close of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, in the fills between the lines of “Chain of Fools” – or on numerous other occasions where she leaves the written melody behind and ventures off to form her own. No female soul singer at full stretch remains quite so concentrated in the throat; pushed to its limits, her voice will tend to growl, not boom. She began to learn control in the Fifties as a guest singer on CL Franklin’s touring sermon shows. On Songs of Faith – the album made with her father in 1956 – she is only 14, the piano sounds as if it has been commandeered from the saloon bar scenes in a cheap Western and the recording overall is subject to long periods of indefinition, such that you suspect fur was used in preference to tape.

But during the ecstatic “Precious Lord”, you hear clearly how her church singing functioned, not mysteriously as an act of self-transcendence, but as an extended exercise in breathing, an opportunity to perfect a tactic she would deploy countless times – snatching an unexpected last gasp from a line where you might reasonably have thought she had run out of breath. (Compare, in 1974, her staggered building of the bridge on the version of Stevie Wonder‘s “Until You Come Back to Me”.) The illusion is a canny one, granting the impression that you’re getting more than the song could be made to sustain by any ordinary singer.

Gospel informed her later vocal arrangements, too. On Songs of Faith her voice picks a line through the noisy approval of the audience (her father’s beefy “Yes”, the shouted interjections of the choir and congregation). Her lines encourage a response and she is in turn encouraged to go higher. The reciprocal nature of this is later heard in her interplay with her backing vocalists, on the call and response effects in “Think” and “Respect”, in the tradeoffs in the chorus of “I Say A Little Prayer” (one of the few pop songs in which the backing vocalists take all the strain at the song’s key moments, while the lead singer offers pieces of punctuation). Franklin regularly did this arranging herself, and saw the virtue in keeping her partners consistent, and in cultivating the right company (she favoured on nearly all her big hits, Cissy Houston – mother of Whitney – and the Sweet Inspirations).

It would have been helpful, early on, had she cultivated the right record company, too. Omens were good when, in 1961, she was offered a contract at Columbia by John Hammond, the man already responsible for signing Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Having signed her, though, Columbia couldn’t think what to do with her. Gospel, her original ground, had no commercial appeal. Thus Mitch Miller, in charge of A&R at the label, put her on a diet of show-tunes and torch ballads – verbally ornate, dense with lush chords and swanky shifts of key. She recorded “Swanee”, and “Over the Rainbow”. She attempted “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “That Lucky Old Sun”. She even lent herself to “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody”. In retrospect, you can hear Franklin’s voice straining against the material and, in the moments of extreme incongruity, threatening to punch its seams out.

Thus she throws a gratuitous, clipped “ah!” between the lines of “Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive”; thus she winds herself up to a piece of frantic bawling in the essentially comic song “You Made Me Love You”. But there are few recordings more indicative of Columbia’s fumbling than the album that Clyde Otis produced for Franklin in 1965. Yeah!!! was recorded live in a supper club and arranged for the singer and a small jazz group. Perhaps you are intended to pronounce the “Yeah!!!” jazz-style, accompanied by a slow nodding of the head, as if it were a piece of breathy but measured approval. Whatever, this is certainly not the place for anything like gospel whooping.

The record opens with “This Could Be The Start of Something”, the pianist skipping innocently while the drums, played with brushes, provide a polite background patter – much like the lyrics of the song, “You’re shopping at Bloomingdales”, minces Franklin, “Or out at a party”. It’s a piece of chit-chat, and the audience knows; the hum of the club’s clientele and the chink of their cutlery on plates can be heard throughout.

There are traces of her younger self. She kindles something more stirring by draping herself languorously across the ballad “Misty”. (She also has a run at that jaunty sing-along piece “If I Had A Hammer”, which, in this context, appears to go down like a meat cleaver in a surgical ward.) But these offer merely slight indications of what her records would become. Later Franklin would develop a voice targeted so specifically on the stomach that you would probably have difficulty eating while she sang, and perhaps for a short time afterwards, as well.

When, after six years, her Columbia contract finally lapsed, Jerry Wexler got her signed to Atlantic and took her into the studio for a re-fit. He bolstered her with a horn section, moved in some tight rhythm and blues players on bass and drums. But perhaps most importantly, his recordings brought back the organ. It’s there on “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)”, her first single for the label, and again on “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”, albeit quietly, but nevertheless trembling away et full vibrato, the closest musical approximation of the physical quaking manifested by the spiritually possessed. And it’s as if its presence re-issues Franklin’s voice with its license, its ability to snap lines off and reach out against the fixity of the musical setting.

In combination with Wexler, she had hits on Atlantic for five years. The American Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues Performance, Female, became known as the Aretha Award, such was her dominance. No one could be expected to sustain that intensity for long, and since then has come a string of albums, smothered by production and largely struggling for songs (Luther Vandross’s Jump To It, 1982, and one or two moments on Who’s Zoomin’ Who, 1985, would be the exceptions). No singer since has qualified for Michigan’s unique award, but this should not surprise us: to be a natural resource, you really have to work at it.

This article first appeared in 1991